Thursday, February 23, 2017

Module 6: What is International Mother Language Day?

International Mother Language Day is the perhaps one of the most important yet least known observance days in human history. It was first proclaimed by the UN’s Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) on November 17, 1999, marking February 21 to henceforth be designated as International Mother Language Day (IMLD). It was first observed the following year on February 21, 2000.

This day of observance’s history lies in the partitioning of India that first came into effect in 1947. This “partition” divided the Bengal province based on the predominant religions of the people that occupied the region, with the western part of the territory became a province of India, and the eastern part became a province of Pakistan known as East Bengal, later becoming East Pakistan. This resulted in great linguistic, cultural, and economic differences between the East and West Pakistan territories. These tensions eventually boiled over into the form of political protests among the majority Bengali-speaking population when Pakistan’s government declared Urdu the singular national language in 1948. Pakistan’s government soon thereafter outlawed these protest, but nevertheless they continued. On February 21, 1952, a handful of students from the University of Dhaka, located in Dhaka, the modern-day capital city of Bangladesh, as well as a few other activists organized a protest. All was going well until later that day when local police opened fire at the protestors, killing four students (Scott 2017). Nearly fifty years later, in 1999, UNESCO established the international day of observance known as International Mother Language Day to remember these students’ deaths in fighting for their right to speak and use their native language. The political unrest continued for a few more years as the speakers of the Bengali language continued to campaign for the right to use their language, until finally, on February 29, 1956, Bengali became an official language of the Pakistan state. Approximately fifteen years later, in 1971 after the Bangladesh Liberation War, Bangladesh became an independent country from Pakistan, and placed Bengali as its official national language (Scott 2017).

Today, International Mother Language Day is a day of global observance, except in Bangladesh where IMLD, or Shohid Dibôsh as it is known there, is regarded as a public holiday, which is not the case in any other part of the world. Another interesting aspect about this day of observance is the fact that every year International Mother Language Day is centered around a specific theme or idea. For example, this year’s theme, according to UNESCO.org, concentrated on promoting Global Citizenship education, or more specifically, “Towards Sustainable Futures through Multilingual Education.” In particular, this theme was centered around making sure everyone, no matter of their race, ethnicity, background, etc. has access to education in their mother language, as “studies report that learning to read or write in your mother language improves learning ability and professional success” (Marsh 2017).

Furthermore, every year on International Mother Language Day, it is not uncommon for governmental and non-governmental agencies and organizations alike to announce policies to encourage mother language learning and support. UNESCO and other UN agencies also participate in events that promote linguistic and cultural diversity, as well as encouraging people to maintain their mother language knowledge and using more than one language in their everyday lives. In Bangladesh, however, for the national holiday known as Shohid Dibôsh in remembrance of the students that were killed in 1952, many people visit a Shaheed Minar (martyr’s monument) where they lay flowers and pay their respects (Scott 2017). Additionally, many people of Bangladesh also award prizes, host literary competitions, as well as eat festive meals and/or organize parties—a truly enlightening experience to any outsider, as it is an important celebration of Bangladesh’s national language and culture.


(Picture 1) UNESCO’s banner to promote the 2017 International Mother Language Day (en.unecso.org)


(Picture 2) A 2012 Shohid Dibôsh (IMLD) celebratory parade on the University of Dhaka campus in Dhaka, Bangladesh. (www.thedailystar.net)



References:
Khan, Anwarus Salam, M.D. International Mother Language Day. www.internationalmotherlanguageday.com. Accessed February 21, 2017. 

Marsh, Natalie. 2017. Mother Language Day promotes multilingual ed. www.thepienews.com. Accessed February 22, 2017.

Scott, John. 2017. International Mother Language Day. www.timeanddate.com. Accessed February 21, 2017.


Wednesday, February 22, 2017

Module 6: The History of IMLD

Module 6: The History of IMLD
By Alexys Manring

            In 1947, the country of Pakistan was formed, located in Southeast Asia and between the countries of India and Afghanistan. One of the first orders of business was to decide what the main or ‘state’ language of Pakistan would be. The borders of this new country were somewhat strange, considering a good portion of its area was split up on either side of India, as pictured below.


            The people of East Pakistan, now known as Bangladesh, mostly spoke the language of Bangla. Naturally, when most of the population speaks a certain language, the official language in that country should be that language—or so the people of Pakistan thought. However, the high-ranking leaders of Pakistan of the time spoke Urdu. They declared that Urdu be the language of Pakistan—the one and only. The founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, stated that “without one State Language no Nation can remain tied up solidly together and function,” even though only 5% of Pakistan had Urdu as their first language (Oldenburg 1985). In comparison, about 64% of people identified Bangla as their mother tongue. East Pakistani people began a long fight against the Pakistan government to get Bangla as one of the state languages.
In 1948 at The Constituent Assembly of Pakistan, it was said that the members could only speak in Urdu or English. When it was proposed for Bangla to also be spoken, the officials rejected this notion and thus started the protest against the government of Pakistan. In addition, the use of Bangla letters was also removed from Pakistani money and stamps. People were also not allowed to join the army unless they could pass the recruitment test in Urdu. Even when a new leader was put into office after Jinnah’s death, further proposals were set forth that continued to undermine the people’s wish of Bangla being a state language. This new leader, Khwaja Nazimuddin, allowed individual provinces to pick provincial languages, but Urdu would remain the official state language. Aggravating the people further, he proposed Bangla to be written in Arabic script. This was the final straw for the Pakistani people.
On February 21, 1952, thousands of people met at Dhaka University to stand against the government. Even though this went against a law enacted in last January to ban all assemblies, the protest went on anyway. This resulted in a brutal attack from the police. Tear gas was thrown into the crowd and armed police officers fired at anyone in the premise. Four people died because of this, including a nine-year-old boy, and many others were injured. This also continued on February 22 and 23, where the people mourned and prayed for those who bravely died in their fight against the government.
The movement did not stop its protests until 1956, when the Pakistan Constituent Assembly finally made both Bangla and Urdu the state languages of Pakistan. Since this, the day February 21 has been declared Language Movement Day. The United Nations also adopted this celebratory day of remembrance in November 1999 as International Mother Language Day (Chowdhury).

My Reaction
            It is always both interesting and yet disappointed to hear about such injustice going on in the world. The origin of International Mother Language Day made me more intrigued and scared to learn more about the inner workings of the Pakistan government, how the leaders of a country can oppress so many of their people without holding back. I know Pakistan was formed to separate the Muslim culture from the Hindi, to get rid of any competition of faith and devotion between all the people. The obvious intention was to create a world of solace for those who have the Muslim belief. In doing so, however, the people included in this transition were forgotten. The leaders who spoke Urdu, a popular language of Muslims, seemed so wrapped up to be faithful to their beliefs that they’d rather sacrifice their people’s wishes. It really puts into perspective how the concept of not speaking a language can take away so much freedom away. It limited the Pakistani’s ability to uphold a leadership position, as those who mainly spoke Bangla couldn’t in the meetings. No one who didn’t speak Urdu could join the army. The money was changed to reflect a country without Bangla letters and the language was even rewritten in a new script.
            Of course, there are similar yet separate events regarding a country’s adoption of a language that have happened over the course of humanity’s history. For example, the United States of America has no official language, under the belief that doing so will restrict the freedom of those inhabiting the country. I feel like this was derived from a people who were oppressed by another entity, the British. The founders of the USA sought out a way to escape the fate of being a country where only the leaders prospered and the poor sunk lower. There was no more king who ruled until death and instead a president took office every four years, balanced by the other branches of government. One of the biggest ways to do this, as I noticed through the events in Pakistan, is through language barriers. The values our founders had are the same to this day, to be inclusive to all who enter our country. To uphold this, there is no need for an official language.
            Another example involving the minority speaking the official language is Ireland, whose main language is Irish. Ironically, very few of the people there speak Irish. The country was formed with most people speaking Irish, though. However, the Irish language is a victim more of circumstance, as those who speak it went through many disasters. The Great Potato Famine eradicated a good amount of the population—the Irish-speaking population. The country was in shambles and to get out of poverty, the people of Ireland had to move to the English-speaking world, such as the USA. They found more employment opportunities if they spoke English and thus never returned to speaking Irish as a necessity. The reason Irish is still the official language is, I suppose, a way to recognize the ancestors who founded Ireland. Heritage cannot be taken away from you. It is always part of you. I think that is why Ireland continue to hold Irish as the main language, even if its population does not commonly speak it.
            The leaders of Pakistan, in contrast, were taking away the functional ability for its people to continue living in its society and prosper. They could not hold positions of power inside the government or even in the military. They were having their whole language rewritten in a different context. To have that abrupt change was a shock to them, which is why they responded the way they did. There was not enough Urdu-speaking people besides the ruling class to defend the changes being made. The idea Jinnah had to separate the Hindis from Muslims via different countries was not a bad one, but the execution is where the plan fell apart, in my opinion. He failed to rally support and only included the powerful in the decision-making. That is a giant problem. To simply reject the language of almost two-thirds of the population was obviously inexcusable, considering the response the Pakistani people had.  
Researching about IMLD also gave me a new perspective on the country of Bangladesh. I have many, many friends from there who speak the language. It always seemed like such a mystery to me of who these people are and where they came from. From writing about their history, I can safely say that Bangladesh is no longer “the tiny country next to India.” It means much more to me, knowing that its people persevered so long to achieve one simple wish.

References
Chowdhury, A. Language Movement. Banglapedia: The National Encyclopedia of Bangladesh. http://en.banglapedia.org. Accessed on February 21, 2017.

Oldenburg, Philip. 1985. “A Place Insufficiently Imagined": Language, Belief, and the Pakistan Crisis of 1971. The Journal of Asian Studies. 44. 711-733.

Friday, February 17, 2017

Module 5: Recording Ancient Language

Language has played an important role in most, if not every, civilization since the birth of civilization itself. Furthermore, perhaps an even more critical aspect of language in the development of these civilizations is the way in which these spoken languages were transcribed and recorded. One of the first known examples of this are the pictograms used by ancient Mesopotamians to communicate basic information about taxes and crops over five thousand years ago (British Museum 2013). This “writing” system eventually evolved into a more complex system of communication, as it developed into a script that is now known as “cuneiform”. Cuneiform was used for thousands of years by Mesopotamian scribes to record trade transactions, astronomy, literature, and even simple day-to-day activities and events on clay tablets. This cuneiform script was eventually adapted into different languages and adopted by many different early civilizations as they needed a way to record things, yet they did not have their own alphabets and systems for writing down their languages (British Museum 2013). Over time, however, more and more civilizations and groups of peoples began to develop their own systems and practices of recording information. Alphabets such as Latin and Cyrillic were developed in most parts of modern-day Europe, logographs were established in Asian territories, abugidas could be found among Arabic and Hebrew cultures, and ancient Egyptians used a method of recording their language known as hieroglyphics (Johari 2016). Each of these methods of writing were used to record historical events, tax accounting, astronomy, etc. in their respective places of origin. Moreover, one could argue that some techniques are more difficult to record/translate than other. However, one common characteristic between these methods of written communication lies in the fact that they were all written down or recorded two-dimensionally in some way. Many people may not know this, but on the other side of the world, in the Western Hemisphere, a group of ancient people known as the Inca had a method for chronicling their stories and transcribing their information. What may be considered an “outside-of-the-box” way of thinking, the Inca used a three-dimensional approach to recording their information called a “Khipus." These were complex knotted instruments made from hand-spun threads that were used to transmit information in a completely revolutionary fashion that was never before even thought about in other parts of the world (Johari 2016). These knots were originally used to record very simple collections of data such as crop count and tax accounting (similar to the pictograms used in ancient Mesopotamia), however, they very soon became more complex and used to record more important and detailed plots of information such as stories of the Spaniard conquests or astrological phenomena. The full meaning and translations of the information found on the Khipus is still not known as the Incan Empire was around for only about 100 years, and the conquistadors destroyed most of them in the effort to convert the Inca people to their god as well as learn their language.
While much about this method of language recording is still unknown to this day, it is still amazing to me that a  group of people from such a bygone era could invent and formulate a system of recording information that was so far outside the normal train of thought for transcribing a language. What is even more remarkable is that these people were able to do this completely independent of any other civilization in the world at the time, and in the time period of just over 100 years. It just goes to show that one should not judge a book by its cover and that not everything is as it seems.

(Picture 1) Example of ancient Mesopotamian cuneiform script carved into sandstone tablet.
(The British Museum; www.mesopotamia.co.uk)


(Picture 2) One of only 600 surviving examples of Khipus in museums and private collections around the world. (Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian; www.newsdesk.si.edu)


References:
British Museum, The. 2013. Mesopotamia: Writing. www.mesopotamia.co.uk. Accessed February 15, 2017.

Johari, Fuad. 2016. Counting the threads of time: The Khipus of the Incas. www.unravellingmag.com. Accessed February 10, 2017.

Neuman, William. 2016. Untangling an Accounting Tool and an Ancient Incan Mystery. www.nytimes.com. Accessed February 14, 2017.


Porter, Jessica. 2016. Smithsonian Snapshot: Quipu. www.newsdesk.si.edu. Accessed February 14, 2017.

Module 5: The Mayan Language

When I originally was introduced to this history of the Mayan civilization I almost couldn’t believe they truly existed. It seemed so interesting it was as if it came straight from a movie. Many people today believe that the Mayan civilization began in the Yucatan area of what is now Mexico. This settling supposedly occurred sometime around 2600 BC and 1800 BC. This culture lasted through many wars and disaster all the way up until the 16th and 17th centuries. The Mayan empire that majority of people recognize it by, arrived between 250AD and 900 AD. This includes the development of large structures and foundations of different cities. During this period the Mayans have advanced in many ways. For example, they have built large temples, established a calendar, and most importantly they had created a writing system.
The decipherment of this language was started by a European named Constantine Rafinesque who could crack the Mayan counting system. A single dot represented one while a bar represented five. The Mayans even had a concept of the number zero. A very long time had passed in which case those who studied their writing believed that it did not represent a language at all or that it was ever completed. In the 1930s, an expert in glyph studies named Eric Thompson had deciphered many signs related to the calendar. The only mistake being he firmly believed that the symbol each stood for an entire word or idea. Even more interesting, the researchers believed that the markings had no phonetic value. It wasn’t until the 1950s when Yuri Valentinovich proposed that the markings were partially phonetic, therefore representing sounds in the Yucatec Mayan language.
After increasingly more decryption of the Mayan Language Tatiana Proskouriakoff effectively proved that the series of stelae in front of a temple represented kings and the history of their life from birth to death. By 1981, at the age of 15, David Stuart had found out that individual Maya words had multiple possibilities of writing. This means that glyphs could be drawn in different ways. Today, many people are attempting to revive the ancient language. Since majority of the glyphs can now be read, the Maya people are relearning their ancestral language.
There are many different features to the writing system that I find to be truly fascinating. The Mayan script is logosyllabic combining around 550 logograms that represent words and around 150 syllabograms that represent syllables. These symbols were carved into stone, written on bark, wood, jade, ceramics, and even manuscripts. Another interesting fact is that the script was most frequently written in paired vertical columns read from left to right and top to bottom like a zigzag.
Additional Information:

References
Carrasco, D. (2000). City of sacrifice: the Aztec empire and the role of violence in civilization. Boston: Beacon Press.
Webster, D. L. (2002). The fall of the ancient Maya: solving the mystery of the Maya collapse. London: Thames & Hudson.
Coe, Mayan Civilization. (n.d.). Retrieved February 17, 2017, from http://www.aztec-history.com/mayan-civilization.html M. D. (2005). The Maya. New York: Thames and Hudson.

Cracking the Maya Code. (n.d.). Retrieved February 17, 2017, from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/mayacode/time-nf.html

Monday, February 13, 2017

Module 3: The Beringian Standstill Hypothesis

There have been many theories proposed over the years regarding the belief of Beringia: a prehistoric landmass that functioned as a bridge which allowed ancient peoples to cross the small stretch of water between modern day Alaska and Siberia, that is now known as the Bering Strait. One of the newest theories, as explored in one of our assignments for Module 4, is known as the “Beringian Standstill Hypothesis.” This theory was proposed by Dr. Edward Vajda in 2008, when he concluded that instead of trekking across Beringia directly many thousands of years ago, these ancient peoples lived in isolation on Beringia for nearly 15,000 years before migrating out into modern-day Siberia and Alaska. The land bridge theory has been around for over 400 years since the Spanish explorer/missionary José de Acosta initially proposed his idea in 1590, and has henceforth been a widely accepted theory since the 1930s. Between 1929 and 1937, a collection of spear points was discovered near Clovis, New Mexico that had a strikingly similar resemblance to the kinds of artifacts found in Beringia years before. Since then, carbon dating of these relics has been able to place them as being around the neighborhood of 13,000 to 13,500 years old, closely matching the timeline of the Beringian Standstill Hypothesis that concluded that these ancient peoples migrated into North America around 15,000 to 10,000 years ago. Because the migration of this once unexplored land would have been extremely leisurely, it makes sense that the arrowheads found in the southern part of the United States (Clovis, New Mexico) were dated as a few thousand years “newer” than the arrowheads found in the Beringian region of the Arctic Circle. Furthermore, with advances in modern technologies, there have been genetic tests conducted as well as linguistic analyses done on Native American languages conducted in order to further prove the existence of the Beringian land bridge and learn more about it. Many of these genetic tests were based upon the findings of a young child found in 1968 near Wilsall, Montana. This child’s remains were discovered along with more than 100 stone and bone tools that were dated to be about 12,700 years old and descended from the Clovis people (Balter 2014). This deeply significant find was, and remains to be the oldest known burial in North America. Years later, this young child’s remains were genetically sequenced, and what scientists discovered was utterly amazing. When comparing this child’s genome to that of a 24,000-year-old Siberian boy and a 4,000-year-old Paleo-Eskimo from Greenland, these scientists were able to confirm without a doubt that Native Americans had indeed originally come from Northeastern Asia/Eurasia (Elias 2014).
It is truly amazing just how much modern science and technology has taught us and allowed us to discover about the past that would have never previously even been dreamed as being possible in earlier times. Stories such as these make me excited for all the opportunities that the future and all its technological innovations can tell us about our past. On that same note, however, it is ironic that every year that goes by, history becomes more dated and difficult to uncover, yet with such miraculous advances in modern technology (such as carbon dating and genetic fingerprinting), we are able to look further and deeper into the past than ever before.

References:
Elias, Scott. 2014. First Americans lived on land bridge for thousands of years, genetics study suggests. www.theconversation.com. Accessed February 8, 2017.
Wade, Nicholas. 2014. Pause Is Seen in a Continent’s Peopling. www.nytimes.com. Accessed February 8, 2017.
Balter, Michael. 2014. Native American Descend from Ancient Montana Boy. www.sciencemag.org. Accessed February 8, 2017.

Friday, February 10, 2017

Module 4: Baby Talk (by Alexys Manring)

            When I started speaking Spanish for the first time, I was fourteen and just started high school. I knew little about the language besides “Hola, me llamo Alexys”, various family relations and animals. Therefore, I did not have anything close to a Spanish accent or any expertise in pronouncing certain sounds in the language. I could roll my r’s and learn how to read aloud “n” versus “ñ”, but to convincingly pull off a sentence in Spanish was difficult for me to achieve—unless I dared to get laughable looks from friends and teachers. Reading and writing Spanish had become just like English to me, but speaking was a whole new level. Why?    
To simply put it: I was not raised with the sounds of the Spanish language when I was younger and thus will always have a “foreign accent,” no matter how hard I try.
It has been concluded by many different studies that infants under the age of one acquire the necessary skills and sounds associated with a certain language easier than adults. While older people can still learn languages other than their native one, it seems impossible to master sound patterns. For example, Professor Corey, after publishing a Hindi-English dictionary, receiving excellent reviews, and teaching phonemics for many years, still gets the same response, “You speak Hindi excellently for an American!” (Scovel 1969). This is because young children undergo a process called “fast mapping,” in which an infant has a steep learning curve to make the connections between the brain’s neurons in order to grasp their native language. In order to do this, the child has to be extremely sensitive and malleable to understand every sound made. Their growing perception of speech is therefore shaped by an increase favoring of their native language and a loss of ability notice non-native contrasts (Nathan, Wells & Donlan 1998).
In 1995, an experiment called the Jusczky’s Head Turn Experiment was tested. Six-month-old and nine-month-old American infants were evaluated based on their interest in the speaking of different languages via their heads turning, the languages being either English or Dutch. While the six-month-olds showed no preference between the languages, it was very clear that the nine-month-olds showed more attention towards the English list (Jusczky, et. al 1995).
This data brings another question to the table: what about bilingual or multilingual children? Surely there would be a difference in the way they grow up, having learned the sounds of multiple languages instead of one. A study done at the University of Washington revealed the developmental differences between bilingual and monolingual infants that ranged from six to twelve months in age. Like Jusczky’s Head Turn Experiment, the older monolingual infants failed to show interest in a second language. The bilingual infants, however, continued to be engaged when introduced to new sounds and languages. Some researchers are calling bilingual children to be “more cognitively flexible” than the monolingual (Klass 2011).
Furthermore, when children adopted into other countries and cultures (i.e. Korean infants being adopted by Dutch families), they still retain the knowledge and sounds already acquired in their early life. These children’s response times to different sounds were then compared with other children who strictly grew up in the Dutch culture. Over the course of thirteen training sessions, the two groups of children were tested on identifying and speaking various sounds. The results of the trial revealed that the Korean-born children significantly outperformed the Dutch-born, no matter the age of the participants. The researchers concluded that exposure to a second language, even when a child is less than six months and removed from that culture, is still crucial to them being able to listen to and produce speech efficiently (Choi, Cutler & Broersma 2017).
Although investigations are still being done to examine the long-term effects of being bilingual versus monolingual, the stark difference in infants has already shown that there is clearly an advantage. Learning multiple languages is enabling children to keep themselves more open-minded and better at communicating, which could definitely spread to more qualities over the course of their lives.

References
Choi, Jiyoun, Anne Cutler, and Mirjam Broersma. 2017. Early development of abstract language knowledge: evidence from perception-production transfer of birth-language memory. rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org. Accessed February 9, 2017.
Klass, Perri. 2011. Hearing Bilingual: How Babies Sort Out Language. www.nytimes.com. Accessed February 6, 2017.
Jusczky, et. al. 1995. The Head-Turn Preference Procedure for Testing Auditory Perception. Infant Behavior and Development. 18. 111-116.
Nathan, Liz, Bill Wells and Chris Donlan. 1998. Children’s comprehension of unfamiliar regional accents: a preliminary investigation. J. Child Lang. 25. 343-365.
Scovel, Tom. 1969. Foreign Accents, Language Acquisition, and Cerebral Dominance. Language Learning: A Journal of Research in Language Studies. 19. 245-253.

Thursday, February 9, 2017

Module 5: Writing Things Down?

         I would like to give a few tips on what I thought was a good way to do the Participation Assignment 5 (using the Cherokee Syllabary). This blog post will probably be more helpful if you read the instructions for the assignment first (Participation Assignment 5). The first piece of advice I would give is to not get too hung up on finding the Cherokee symbol that match the sound of the English word. Look around, find something that is close, and stick with it. With the words given in the assignment it will be very difficult (probably impossible on some words) to find the symbols that are exact matches for the English word. Make sure you are looking for the Cherokee symbols that will closely match the sounds your word makes rather than looking for the Cherokee symbols that will closely spell out your word. I did a few examples below that will hopefully give you an idea (apart from the example that Amy did) on ways you could do the assignment. Keep in mind that my way of doing it is only an example, there is no exact way to go about it, so do your best!

  •          Awesome could be ᎠᏑᎺ and would make the sounds of “a-su-me”
  •          Appreciate could be ᎠᏘᏏᎠᏖ and would make the sounds “a-ti-si-a-te”
  •          Hardly could be ᎭᏓᎵ and would make the sounds “ha-da-li”
Again, remember that this was simply the way I went about it. You can go about it a different way, but the take-away is that it can't come out perfectly, so don't stress too much. Best of luck!

Wednesday, February 8, 2017

Module 3: Learning Languages at Different Ages

I began to learn Spanish at a very young age when I was only in second grade. I then stopped taking Spanish until I was in high school, and I had to re-learn most of the language, and found that I barely retained any of the Spanish skills that I had learned as a child. How could this be? I felt like going into my Spanish classes in high school would be easier since I had such a strong background in Spanish as a child.
In an article written by Monika Schmid , childhood is identified as the “critical period” for learning a new language. Research suggests that as we get older “our ability to learn a second language diminishes” (Schmid). Popular opinion also suggests that younger children have the ability to retain information better, due to the fact that they are still developing their first language skills, and certain grammatical and pronunciation habits are easier to overcome this way.
In an article written by Laura Clark, it is claimed that the peak age for second language acquisition skills is six or seven, while recent research suggests that it may possibly even be earlier than that; when kids are around 3 or 4 years old. Creativity and critical thinking have been shown to be enhanced in children who start learning a second language at preschool age (Clark). “50% of our ability to learn is developed by age four” (Clark) which makes children who are around preschool age able to learn the basic concepts of another language. Children at this age are generally most impressionable, and it is a very critical age for learning ranging wider than just language comprehension.
I think that my inability to retain Spanish after learning it at a young age came from a variety of factors. I think that it is possible that I was too old (being around 8 or 9 and missing the claimed “critical period”) when I began to learn Spanish, and my grammar and pronunciation skills were too far advanced in English. Secondly, I don’t think that I was fully invested in learning the language. I was in Spanish classes before school because my mom wanted me to get exposed to a language other than English- not because I wanted to. I sat in the class, did the work, and payed attention, but because I didn't have a genuine interest in the course material, and I was a little bit above the "critical age" I did not retain the information as well as a child younger than me would have. 
Learning a second language in high school is by no means "bad", and many students have found success in learning at an older age, and have even become more fluent. But the ideal age to become fluent in a second language is between the ages of 3-7, because many first-language habits have not been formed yet. 



Works Cited:
Clark, Laura. “The Best Age for Kids to Learn a Second Language.” Parent Co. N.p., 26 Apr. 2016. Web. 07 Feb. 2017


Schmid, Monika. The Independent. Independent Digital News and Media, n.d. Web. 06 Feb. 2017.